Search

I was intrigued yesterday to observe on Twitter a good deal of chatter from conservative religious types on the topic of husbands who refuse to eat alone with any woman other than their wife.

The not eating with anyone but your wife rule is based on the assumption that heterosexual marriage is the only possible partnership, being as the religious conservative crowd doesn’t believe LGBTQI people are fully human so don’t see the need for inclusion.

I tracked this odd behaviour down to a series of articles on US Vice President Mike Pence, who will not allow himself to be alone with women other than his wife, Karen, and who will not attend any functions at which alcohol is served unless Karen is by his side.The Pences are evangelical Christians.

They’re spoiled for choice in the US, aren’t they? A pussy grabber or a man with unresolved Oedipal conflicts who can only be prevented from grabbing pussy by having his mother wife beside him the entire time. Ladies, I give you the current leader of the Western world, and the one who’ll take his place in the event of unfortunate circumstances.

The most serious consequence of these bizarre restrictions is that women are immediately disadvantaged in terms of job opportunities, because there are men apparently unable to control their sexual impulses. Or there are wives with so little trust in husbands, they cannot cope with their man meeting alone with any woman who is not them.

It’s astounding that women can be refused job and career opportunities in order to safeguard somebody else’s deluded notion of heterosexual partnership. It’s astounding that woman are still seen first as opportunities for sex, over and above all other qualities, talents and capabilities.

It’s astounding that there are women who choose to spend their lives with men they think so little of they must infantilise them, and never let them out on their own, and men who enforce the same restrictions on their wives. I believe this is a form of domestic violence, an excess of jealousy and suspicion that has become normalised in some circles, to the degree that both parties submit to it and call it “respect.”

Most of us wouldn’t have friendships with people we can’t trust, yet it’s fine to be married to someone you don’t trust?

Very low bar some people set for marriage.

It isn’t only in job and career opportunities that heterosexual insecurities work to restrict the lives of women. Friendships, intellectual engagements, the pleasure of shared interests can also be difficult, if not impossible, when someone is in an insecure relationship that is threatened by a partner’s perfectly legitimate connections with another party.

Does marriage have to mean the end of every possibility of significant connection with anybody other than your spouse? Because if it does, it’s a dead-end that stunts humanity.

Many a single woman has a story of how she’s been treated with suspicion by friends, even good friends, who suddenly become uncomfortable with her when their husbands are around. I’ve heard of female friendships being ruined in such situations, and women left wondering what on earth they’d done to offend.

Unfortunately, some insecure wives tend to blame their inability to trust their husbands, or their husband’s actual untrustworthiness, on their female friends, rather than addressing the frightening challenges mistrust throws up in the marriage, and to them as individuals. The same goes for insecure husbands.

I mean, look. We’re still at the stage of blame the woman. No matter which way you look at it, it’s always let the men off the hook because they’re too infantile to take responsibility for themselves, and blame the woman. On the face of it, the Pence rule is bizarre and extreme, however, to settle for that explanation is to deny its far-reaching and damaging implications. Marriages built on mistrust are detrimental to women, whether it’s the US Vice President’s or those in your own social circle. And they couldn’t be a worse partnership model for the young.

51 Responses to “How marriages based on mistrust hold back all women”

Firstly, how do you know this? He might be one of those guys who no longer has sex with anyone. Did he say he has sex with her? When? More importantly, why? Whose business is it, other than his and hers?

Secondly, my grandfather used to call my grandmother “Mother”, after she bore four of his children including my mother. It was his standard form of address to her, every day, and the whole family regarded it as a term of respect and endearment. In return, she called him “Our Dad” or “Pops”.

It was the 1950s and 1960s, in rural working-class Nottinghamshire, and they weren’t devout Christians. The terms of address were just a reflection of their broader relationship with the rest of the family, whom they adored. And we, their children and grandchildren, all adored them. Nobody (family, friends, neighbours, anybody) ever regarded it as remotely odd. Many others in the extended family and the neighbourhood did likewise. There was no “unresolved Oedipal conflict”. Not a hint of one.

Well, you’re right Arthur, I don’t know if Pence has sex with his wife. He must have at some point or he wouldn’t be calling her Mother. Well, I hope so because if he hasn’t well Christ on a cracker those kids arrived from an immaculate conception and the son of god is the US Veep.
As for calling your spouse Mother, or Father, it’s obviously a thing I was unaware of, and all I can say is it sounds ok within the family if everyone likes it, maybe not so much if you’re the US Veep at a formal dinner.
And particularly questionable when you hold the kind of views Pence does on women, abortion, & reproduction.

No, Arthur is right. It is an old and quaint thing and a cultural artifact from an earlier time well established in some parts that has died out pretty much over recent generations.

Classic Baptist sort of stuff that backgrounds red state culture in the US.. Freud and modernist notions come a bit later on the timeline and as we know also with Creationism versus Evolution the result is a sort of schism accompanied by much debate, angst and soul searching between those who find the new antiithesis convincing and those who feel that the new ideas miss the point re faith versus reason and cant reconcile the thing as anything but binary.

All back to the inevitable difficulties in establishing a route to theological certainty from metaphysics and that’s in the nature of the beast, isn’t it.and definitional as to the Human Condition.

It’s really a stuff of life conversation, very seductive but that’s probably due to the ageing process and too many blind alleys in the past.

Áre not peope always going to wonder if anything continues after we (appear) to kark it, it is an uncomfortable reality that by its nature we cannot know beyond doubt, the search for the final signified and no closure we can be that comfortable with although you can speculate on the nature of it , processive or otherwise.

Argument from Design is fascinating, but the fundamentalists always take these things literally, forgetting the the thing is speculative but not proven or provable outside of the march of human experience to places we have not yet arrived at and actually contain a number of options, from obliteration to punishment and or bliss.

The likes of Epicurus and Buddha seemed to advocate not getting caught up to much in it all and concentrating on the here and now, doing no harm for a clear conscience and accepting and reconciling to the reality that you won’t know what’s after death until after it happens, including the notion of the definitive end of experience…make the best of things as they are in a kindly sort of way as Bob Ellis said, “We shall see what we shall see”.

My very Catholic (at least at the time they were married) mother still calls my father ‘father’ diminutives in front of my sister and myself. But never intentionally in front of non-family members; she has slipped up on occasion. My always secular father doesn’t refer to her as ‘mother’, but uses a pet name I don’t fully understand, as it pre-dates my birth. So, that aspect doesn’t surprise or disturb me at all. I don’t know (and don’t want to know) the state of my parent’s sex life, but they have always referred to each other in this way for as long as I remember.

As to the eating and not drinking 1-on-1 thing, while there is an old religious idea to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, I know a few military couples will come to similar agreements prior to deployment because they do not want to risk their relationship in any manner. So, I don’t think it is necessarily religious, particularly if it is reciprocal. I can’t say I care enough to find out whether Pence’s wife similarly avoids eating with men 1-on-1.

Another point. Pence “will not allow himself to be alone with women other than his wife”. You may be right that he can’t trust himself not to misbehave or commit an indiscretion. Who knows? But have you considered an alternative possibility? Maybe, as a high-profile public figure, he adopts this standard as a form of self-protection.

At a much less prominent level than the US VP, I was an instructor in a business college for nearly a decade, during which I had thousands of one-on-one conversations, discussing the technicalities of their work and/or their academic progress, with individual students, many of whom were female, mostly much younger than me.

I made sure that not a single one of those conversations was conducted without a third person having a direct line of sight of the student and me. Not one. Was I afraid I’d lose control? Not at all. I had no intention of committing any indiscretion, ever. I also knew that just occasionally, not very often but more than zero times in human history, a woman has been known to accuse a man of an indiscretion he did not commit.

My policy (call it an insurance policy if you wish) entirely prevented that, and any possible complication (inquiries, police, courts, sackings, blackmail, whatever) which might have resulted from such an accusation. My policy was unobtrusive, unheralded, unannounced. It was just the professional standard I adopted, as did most of my male and female colleagues.

Perhaps Pence follows some similar personal rule. Has anyone asked him? And if they have, why should we expect an answer? Again, whose business is it other than his?

All valid points, Arthur. But if a woman (or a man for that matter) may make an unfounded accusation based on extraneous dislike; they may even get their friends to make similar claims to establish corroboration. (BTW, the loyal supporters of Assange think this to be his scenario, despite any other evidence to the contrary)

Careers can be ruined without any actual wrongdoing. But your declared procedure was prudent.

I’ve explained in the article how such discriminatory practices as Pence’s disadvantage women.
Your policy makes sense in your circumstances, hopefully you were not making employment decisions on whether or not you could be trusted to eat dinner alone with a female colleague

You are troublesome, frivolous and corrupting creatures, Jennifer…did you know that?

The poet John Milton identified a phenomena when he wrote “Paradise Lost”, where he identified the process of the primeval lapse that defines the wretched condition of humanity and men in particular led astray and the pernicious role of women who brought their disasters down on themselves and poor men (see also Spencer and “Ërrour”, from the “Fairie Queen” of early Elzabethan times), creating the lot of the common man, expelled from God abd the Garden into this desert we know as life in its present form, responsible for the tirsome governance of the skittish and subjectively ruled by emotion, female of the species.

Hence Pence avoids their nuisance ways by not being entrapped. You may see this as classic Puritan, I couldn’t possibly speculate.

For more, read “Mad “Woman in the Attic” By US English lit academics Gilbert and Gubar and their history of women’s literary experience and tradition as defined within their idea of the historical development and reality of “Patriarchy”.

Lots of interesting stuff about early female writers who defied the system to write, then Austen, the Brontes and through to Virginia Wolff and maybe Margaret Atwood in our time, although Atwood is probably a result of the same processes that grew Gilbert and Gubar but a generation on, to me, for where the process has been heading.

I work with mental teenagers. And live with different mental teenagers. The sort of people who think oglaf is funny. And the FITH thing has just got my partner into “trouble” at work because she was decided to explain why she was laughing at her phone and now her workmates are talking about that instead of working. Whereas my coworker just said “I don’t think calling it that would work”.

Yes. Illustrates my point about the unceasing God- appointed task of regulation of female fertility..

For heaven’s sake, a Tea Party Republican identified some time ago that rape is merely womens devious way of getting pregnant, since they can clamp their legs or even expel embryos if they don’t desire to be in this state. (You know where my logic leads to and I shouldn’t have to spell it out).

Of course, to expel an embryo itself is against God’s word, so the task becomes even more onerous for men, burdened as we are with these tasks… honestly, like herding cats.

And what is this nonsense about women’s sexual pleasure?

T’aint needed for a woman to get pregnant and fulfiil her god -ordained role). Better ir is not pleasurable, lest temptation befall women, with their weak self control. Also, time consuming.

Prick in your head makes a different sort of sense. The latter sounds angrier to me. And it does vaguely ring 1970’s feminism bells for me. Although I fear I hung out with the wrong sort of 70’s feminists, they used to make very rude jokes.

Yup, Samantha Bee is great.

Also, I’m not sure that “you’re more grown up than Donald Trump” is the sort of compliment I’m comfortable with. Like “more ethical than Malcolm Turnbull” it seems to be condemning with faint praise. (I’m not offended, I’m just pointing that out)

Sadly the flip side of this is the man-children who actively try to have sex with any woman they’re alone with. By “woman” I mean “young attractive woman” because to those men the other sort don’t count. And by “have sex with” I suspect I mean “or rape”, because … surely no-one could be so delusional as to think that Mike Pence is sexually irresistible to every woman? It’s almost understandable once you get your head round “if you marry a rapist”. In that situation the wife probably wants to minimise the number of opportunities he has to rape. Does Mike Pence think of it that way?

That’s an aspect I hadn’t thought of, Moz.
I did laugh at the idea of every woman finding Pence irresistible, & he & Mrs Pence sharing that delusion. But of course, your sexual assault scenario in fact makes far more sense.

I find the machinations surrounding religion to be absolutely ridiculous, and only exist as a form of control mechanism of the people who can be conned by Church or Cult into relieving themselves of 10% of their income in order to travel to heaven after death and/or clear their conscience of misdeeds by confessing and saying three hail Mary’s and two our father’s. I take full responsibility for my own actions and don’t rely on third party forgiveness to a God that may or may not exist, certainly I have not seen any proof of existence.

Although Bill and Hilary may have had a very sophisticated relationship and who knows perhaps HRC was just a lot more discreet than Bill even after banging an entire football team on the road between stump speeches she managed her voracious sexual appetite while cajoling the linebackers to keep their gentlemanly promise to be discreet too? Might explain the wobbly legs when Security had to help her into the People Mover.

But humiliated she was in the eyes of the American electorate for Bill’s indiscretions, not so much for the acts themselves but for the revealing of them and the tenuous position it placed HRC in when those very acts were deemed inappropriate or unsought by what turned out to be the victims of Billy boy.

The eventual story that will probably bury the Donald will be one of his impotence or lousy sexual performance during some escapade. That is the story I would be hunting down.

The primal scream of the abandoned baby who became Lennon was ‘Mother’, and Yoko had her only child abducted by her first husband Tony Cox, so: there’s some heavy shit going down with that instance you quote, just as with the fundamentalist Pence VP [and may he always remain so].

you may have missed the 70’s trend for primal scream therapy, and Lennon’s discussion of doing it, and discovering how deeply his mother disappearing had affected him [of course.] He then wrote ‘Mother’ (“you left me, but I never left you”) which ends in the primal scream. earlier his ‘Julia’ [her name] was about her, and his son named Julian, so the mother thing is big with him. [was].
I am not [no aprons] the sort of spouse [no knitting] a man might dare ever refer to as ‘mother’.
So pleased to see you have the same cultural frame of reference that I do.
I feel sorry for anyone who could/would not immensely enjoy my favourite Sellers: ‘I’m Alright Jack’ – unions, class, work ethic.

Well, I remember being the only single woman at a table of couples at a wedding: one chronically unfaithful husband danced in turn with each of the women except me. Presumably I might have tempted him out on a dance floor surrounded by the other hundred or so guests. We single women evidently give off vibes that destroy the moral fibre of married men merely by being within a metre of them.
THe NYTimes ethics column informed a woman last year that she should no longer have conversations or socialise with a married colleague because he found her attractive, even though she’d told him she was not interested in a relationship with a married man. An awful lot of people seem to believe that if you haven’t found a partner within a certain time you should be eliminated one way or another, as in the movie The Lobster. Is the coupled world as hostile to single men?

It very much can be, but often in subtly different ways. Even as simple as being treated as the rapist rather than the seductress. And having the husbands come after you rather than their wife because obviously women have no capacity to desire, ergo if something may have happened it must be the fault of the (single) man.

There’s also the flip side – women dare not let “their” man hang out with his single friends lest he start missing the days when he was free and single and want to do that more often. Or just coming home happy and drunk from a “night out with the boys”.

But on a day to day practical basis, men tend to have fewer and weaker social ties so they more tend to suffer lack of invites to those social events rather than active exclusion. Not helped by some men I know just not thinking of inviting their single male friends to anything… I suspect as part of a more general mental division between “wifey social stuff, nod and smile” and “homosocial events that I don’t do any more because the better half doesn’t like it”.

OTOH there seem to be quite a few single guys at social events I go to. Not having a partner isn’t really a marker at most stuff I attend, for any gender.

Amazing! In between reading a Kathy Reichs tale about religious fanatics in the Deep South, I was reading a day or two ago about his glee at being able to cut funding for a US organisation called Planned Parenthood, also this other stuff about women not being in the room and so forth.. in fact I was just commenting at a FB page on him with some American friends.

Wonder if his wife is allowed to get her rocks off..

Really comes across as a sort of Addams Family scenario, the Trump administration.

I’d love to get a really good review of the pathology from someone like Stewart Hase also, but it must be a pretty fraught place, inside the veep’s head- don’t go there.

What a ridiculous stereotype, the “henpecked husband”. Stuff breaks down or wears out, and needs fixing all the time. Sometimes it’s the car, sometimes the lawnmower. Sometimes the details of our health insurance need renegotiating, sometimes we need to buy a new fridge and make a wise consumer choice. Right now our dishwasher needs a repair. This stuff happens all the time, unless you happen to live in some 22nd century household where broken stuff fixes itself or your robots take charge.

Whatever it is, there’s an ongoing need for both partners in a household to fix stuff for the benefit of both (plus the kids if you have any). When I need to fix stuff, I do it not because some “hen” has “pecked” me, but because it needs fixing and my wife is busy doing something else to benefit our household. If I can’t fix it, we call in a tradie and pay for it to be fixed.

“allowed to get her rocks off” – happy clappers the same as radicalislams there. excise that clitoris because we have been scared of Woman since adam saw eve and became erect.
Obviously Pences do not exclaim “oh god … oh god …” IF they actually achieve a big O